Your blog is all about your readers, and obviously, the more of a core following you are able to build, the more valuable your blog will be when it comes to getting you business.
The thing is that people today are busy - and forgetful. Maybe someone really found your blog useful and interesting, but then simply never finds the time to check beck, or just plain forgets about you. You’ve just lost a reader and that’s a pity.
But there’s a way to keep as many of those interested readers as possible, and that is to offer them an easy way to subscribe to your blog feed so that they are notified whenever you post something new. For you jargon-haters, your blog feed is simply a stream of your latest blog posts that is updated automatically as you add new material.
While there are literally thousands of different feed reader software and websites that people can use to subscribe to your blog and view your newest posts, all you have to do is to use a free blog feed subscription service like FeedBurner and your readers (or at least the vast majority of them) will be catered for. What’s more, FeedBurner lets you manage your blog feed in one place, and can also give you a whole range of options and some interesting statistics about who is reading your blog.
Of course, just having a subscription option will not count for much if you don’t promote it by prominently displaying an eye-catching ‘Subscribe to this blog’ button on your website. Also, it would be a great idea to actively ask readers to subscribe by means of a standard line of text after each blog post to the tune of, ‘If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe to know when we publish our next one’. This will of course link to your blog subscription page.
Another thing you can easily do with FeedBurner is to give your readers the option to subscribe to your blog via e-mail. This is a very important thing to offer, because it allows you to make your blog accessible to all those many visitors who don’t use feed readers for whatever reason.
Turning casual blog visitors into regular readers is a key part of making your blog work, and, assuming that you have good, informative content that is worth reading, all your visitors may need to get them to come back to your blog again and again is a way to do it easily and automatically.
